A Republic If You Can Keep It

Originally published July 15, 2010, By Linda. Updated September 21, 2014. 2 Comments

The story goes that Benjamin Franklin was approached by a woman as he left the Constitutional Convention 1 Recorded by Constitution signer James McHenry in his diary which was reprinted in 1906. Reference..

She asked:

“What have you given us?”

Franklin is said to have replied:

“A republic, if you can keep it.”

This exchange was common knowledge 50 years or so ago, as commonly taught to schoolchildren as the story about George Washington’s boyhood experience practicing a woodcutter’s skill on his father’s prized cherry tree and, later, refusing to lie about it. It turns out, the tale about Washington was a lie. But Franklin's conversation with Mrs. Powell really occurred. Why is it, then, that most people are still aware of the fiction about Washington but are ignorant of the fact about Franklin and, in particular, the truth of Franklin's comment?

Today many, if not most, people believe the Founders gave us a democracy, instead of a constitutional republic, or a hybridized version of the two, called a democratic republic. A Lincoln Journal Star reader recently took this latter position, and, in making his point, commented that the Founders were “pro-democracy.”

Only someone who is oblivious, both to history and to the writings and beliefs of the Founders, could make such a statement. In fact, the Founders unanimously condemned democracy as a form of government.

-- In Federalist No. 10, James Madison, often referred to as “the father of the Constitution,” said, “(D)emocracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they are violent in their deaths.”

-- Thomas Jefferson said: "The majority, oppressing an individual, is guilty of a crime, abuses its strength, and by acting on the law of the strongest breaks up the foundations of society."

-- Fisher Ames, a member of Congress during the eight years that George Washington was president, wrote an essay called “the Mire of Democracy.” In it, he said that the framers of the Constitution “intended our government should be a republic, which differs more widely from a democracy than a democracy from despotism.”

But why this apparent hatred for democracy? Isn't “majority rules” the fairest of all possible forms of government? Stay tuned for thoughts on these and other questions.

“We study the past to understand the present; we understand the present to guide the future." -- William ...

Back on January 17, 2013, I published an article here at the GiN website entitled “NE Medicaid Expansion: The Race is On.” I followed up with an entire series of articles detailing why Medicaid expansion is an uncommonly bad idea. Those articles were widely read and Human Services Committee will hold a hearing tomorrow, February 28th, on LB577, the bill to exp